I installed SL6.4 to my 4gb flash drive using liveusb-creator with a persistent filesystem of around 2gb. Everything works fine except for one major problem - I get lag spikes for no reason when the system isn't even doing anything.

Observing iotop which I installed, it appears to be a problem with the persistent filesystem:

I can let this sit and it will happen pretty often with little to nothing going on. I'm posting this message from this installation and haven't had any freeze ups but it occurs so much that it makes everything slow from trying to browse around to installing packages, really anything.

What can I do? This flash drive isn't crappy and I've tested it recently. I have also had various Ubuntu, Backtrack, and a couple others installed that I didn't like and those didn't give me this problem with a persistent filesystem.

Like I said I haven't tried this myself so I'm not quite sure what's wrong here, but I would have formatted the USB stick with ext2 first rather than leaving it FAT32, it could be the fact that it's FAT32.

Also I usually repartition USB sticks from scratch using fdisk -S 32 -H 32 /dev/sdX (where X is the appropriate device letter) before using them for optimum alignment.

That said I have no idea if these two suggestions would make a difference in your case or if there is a different problem.

Okay so it's been a while and I became extremely busy after I'd posted that, but I had some time to give this all a test once again and to no avail. Ext2 showed no improvement again but it was worth a shot. I tried the system on two completely different computers, one being my netbook and the other being my desktop. Both showed the same issue with iotop and the loop having a high iowait.

I decided to throw fedora 18 on this pen drive which I'm posting from right now on my desktop and there are no issues at all. i/o top only shows a little bit of i/o being used now and then while browsing around and that's to be expected. There aren't these 99% spikes.

I only have USB 2.0 ports on all of these machines but really from all of my testing here it appears something isn't right with SL6.4 and maybe earlier versions with a persistent filesystem. I've had a few other live images on this drive with persistent filesystems as I mentioned earlier and I gave Ubuntu a shot again as well before trying Fedora and it's worked perfectly.

I guess I'm just going to accept that I'm not going to be able to get this to work. It's not a big deal to me though because I just wanted to have linux available on my pen drive all the time for the heck of it, and wanted it to be SL but that's not going to work out for me sadly. I don't have another USB drive with me to test to see if it's just something up with this drive right now, but I'm out of possible ideas here otherwise.